Embodiments herein present methods for evaluating whether to compress data sent to a print device.
With some conventional systems, large digital images are sent from a print server to a remote printer via a network. These systems support the technical document marketplace. The physical size of such images can be quite large: 24″×36″ is typical, and some prints can exceed 50 feet in length. Such remote printers may handle only one type of image (e.g., TIFF images) either compressed or uncompressed.
The print servers generally utilize hardware-type compression methodologies to allow the image data to be compressed/decompressed as it travels to and from the hard disk. However, this hardware-type compression is often incompatible with the image format. For example, in some systems, all TIFF compression for the remote printer is done via software-type compression methodologies, and not hardware-type compression methodologies. The software compression process may be very time consuming and may result in a poor compression ratio. If the compression ratio is to low (e.g., approaches 1:1), the compression process loses its utility and it may be more desirable to transmit an uncompressed image to the printer, rather than transmitting a poorly compressed image or utilizing a large amount of resources to compresses and decompress the image.
Previous criteria for determining whether to perform such a software compression depended on the user selection for document type, using the software compression statistics from the last few images as a predictor, or using the compression ratio obtained with the onboard hardware as a predictor.